This Green and Pleasant Land

I walk down street and hear a couple of old people saying that when they were young everything was better, a bygone age sepia tinged and nostalgic.
As I walk on my senses are assaulted by 12 year olds drinking, swearing and smoking. Cars lit up garish, rush by. Radios beat out their music to the world. I worry I’m getting old myself and don’t understand the ‘youth of today’. Then I look back 2 decades to when I was 12 I never drank or swore in public, even the bad kids had some respect for their teachers, now it seems teachers can’t go five minutes without been sworn at.

I wonder why.

I walk on passed the Off Licence where fake ID’s excuses and protestations of innocence are all rejected, they swear and leave empty handed. Where are their parents, why does the manager have to risk his job because of these urchins and their parents lack of control?

I walk on by the police station that closes at 5, thieves knowing the nearest car is 15 miles away, but there probably PCs inside filling in forms in triplicate just because they stopped some yobs wrecking a bus-stop.

I walk on out into the country and see rundown farms next to cottages only used at the weekend, Range-Rover in the drive. I look over at the farm and between the decaying buildings the farmer’s children play, the farmer and his wife look on, they worry about bills and the fact they’ll be the last generation to farm this land. Their children could cannot afford to carry on the tradition and live in this rural idyll as they have for generations past.* I walk back to town, enough of this bleakness, I return home and then onto the pub, with it’s friendly staff and my good friends, whose talk of Sci-fi, goblins and life in general lift my spirits, sometimes deep winding conversations about life or maybe a frivolous subject of whimsy about nothing or flit back between each whatever the subject are always interesting, all this on a Friday night, I forget about the ignorance and idiocy outside and enjoy my pint. Why would I want to swap this for night-clubs deafening music and drunken punch up.

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* I was intending to add in at this point a political aspect to the this piece although I tried to add it in several ways and spent the best part of an hour trying, but I couldn’t get it to feel right, So I’m going to make the point in straight essay form…
It seems to me that a lot the problems occurring today a to do the lack of respect people have with the government. If we have no respect for our leaders, then how can respect be gained for other authority figures. 2 million people marched against the War in Iraq, the government plagiarised a 10 year old graduate thesis on WMD to browbeat it own MPs into agreeing and we are still there now, we shouldn‘t stay as it not our country but we can‘t leave because of the mess made.

The control they want over aspects of public life doesn’t mean thing are getting better. They won’t allow people to use their on judgement gained though years of experience. I know from friends and my own personal experience as well as reading blogs linked above, that the police and healthcare services are in decline, one of which a government minister called the author a liar, I know who I would trust. I going to stop now before I bore you all, but one last point about the depth of which spin and marketing (lying) has sunk. On the London Tube they now have a recorded announcement to inform us passengers that the Service is Good, why do we need an announcement for this, we don’t all announce that were at work today it’s expected, this should be the norm, the norm doesn’t need to be announced.
Anyway that’s all for now.